Life was good. That’s what Mike Eels, 46 years old, multi-billionaire, father of seven, CEO, owner and founder (per contractual agreement with the other, less-important people involved in the creation) of the world’s greatest, most widely used and best social media platform thought. Life was good, and he was on top of the world. Figuratively and literally, he chuckled to himself as he stepped out of the elevator of his 76th story penthouse suite.

He whistled while making his way to his home office, overlooking the beautiful panorama of New York city. It was midday and the sun was shining, reflecting off all the shiny, sleek surfaces of the modernist’s dream interior. It was making his head hurt so he brought his smartwatch up and said, “Lower the blinds, 80%.” By the time he was sitting down in the plush director’s chair and starting up his computer, the whole apartment was in a comfortable half-darkness.

Recently, when asked during an interview with People Magazine, Mike had said that, while they were an outdated relic of a time surpassed, he still kept a clunky desktop computer in his workspace. The reason was simple, it allowed a man to have a designated space where to get work done. The grind was neverending of course, and a supergenius like him was always on, but there was something inexplicably charming and… basic about sitting down to use a computer. It made him feel like one of the plebs, at least for a bit. So, Mike did just that, and got to work making the world a better place.

The reason Λ, his darling, his dearest baby, the product of his own hard work and effort, was the best place to be on the internet, especially since he got sole ownership, was because he was just so involved with it. Thanks to some of the clever little ants over in R&D, Λ, at least his Λ, came with Lammie, a cutting edge superfast, super smart AI, trained on the greatest libraries and most-curated, smartest books out there. No scraped slop for Lammie, she was the real deal. Of course, due to the sheer power needed to keep her running, she wasn’t even out in beta testing, only available through special premium accounts, belonging to a select few of his most trusted buddies and himself.

Still humming, Mike found the Λ app on his machine, feeling pretty good about the day ahead.

“Huh,” he said to himself. For some reason, he was logged out. Well, Lammie was going through a major scheduled upgrade so he supposed that this was part of it. No matter, he knew his username and password, so he typed them in then clicked the shiny little “Login” button.

ACCESS DENIED

Mike frowned. Not even having the decency to flash, the message appeared as a popup, its glaring red capitals at odds with the sleek UI of the rest of the desktop app.

He’ll really have to talk to someone about that, it was like the color itself was trying to piss him off.

He shut the popup down and retyped his password.

ACCESS DENIED

Groaning, he pulled out his phone and opened the app there. Also logged out. Thankfully, he had saved his login details on the phone and connected them to the face-recognition password manager. He angles the phone so that the lighting’s good and juts out his jaw just right.

ACCESS DENIED

Because he’s a chill guy, Mike mercilessly crushes the urge to hurl his phone across the shiny, sleek office. He could get a new one within half an hour, true, but he didn’t go around breaking things like ‘a child throwing a tantrum’, no matter what his third (soon-to-be-ex) wife said. He takes a deep breath and tries again.

ACCESS DENIED

Maybe he wasn’t such a chill guy after all, because one second he was staring at the ridiculous popup and the next his phone was across the room, on the floor, where it had landed after bouncing off the wall. Mike doesn’t bother going to pick it up, he needs to reset his password.

The “Forgot Your Password?” hyperlink is right under the login button, and the whole process takes maybe three minutes, including having to pick up his (now cracked) phone for two-factor-authentication. Mike types, retypes and copies and pastes his new password into a note, just in case. He gets automatically returned to the login screen, so he copy-pastes it again and clicks “Login”.

ACCESS DENIED

“Alright! —- this, —- you, that’s enough!” he yells pushing himself away from the desk. Mike raises his smartwatch to his mouth, because even in a stressful situation like this, talking into a watch makes him feel like a secret agent, “Call Sonya,” he snaps. “Calling Sonya, from Research and Development,” the calming, AI generated, female voice responds then the line slips into performative beeps, as if the signal isn’t digital.
The phone “rings” a few times then switches to voicemail: “You’ve reached Sonya—” Mike cuts the line before the message can continue.

He opens the messenger app instead and leaves a voicenote, “Sonya, pick up the ——- phone, I got locked out of my admin account, the ——- password reset isn’t working either.” He watches the little checkmarks indicating that his message had been sent but not yet delivered.

Groaning, Mike rubs his face. This whole thing was a clown-show, start to finish. He knew he was doing the right thing when he bought out the entirety of the advisory board, look at the kind of bullshit they left for him to clean up, even months later. He needs to make a post about this, his followers will surely be able to understand what kind of dumbasses he has to deal with, and react accordingly. His public account wasn’t connected with the admin one, not until Lammie rolls out. He manages to log into that one without a hitch.

Still cleaning up these losers’ messes, password recovery straight up doesn’t work on premium accounts🙄🤣

He typed out, then clicked “Post”.

It didn’t take long for the notifications to start pouring in. He likes the ones that he finds funny, responds to a few where it seemed appropriate and in general let the wave of support and commiseration wash over him. He took a sip of his coffee and filtered the quote-reposts, wanting to find the right ones to dunk on.

LOL. lmao even. dude straight up doesn’t even know what’s happening in his own company🙈🙈

Mike snorted, right, like this rando online knew something he didn’t. looks like it REALLY is #OutOfTouchThursday😭

What was “out of touch Thursday”?

lmaooo was this what it was like to watch the Ceaușescu thing live on tv???👀👄🍿 [translated from Romanian]

Ceaușescu? What was that? Were they just making up guys to be mad about now? Mike kept on scrolling, knowing that these monkeys were making fun of him, but they seemed to think they knew something he didn’t and he was too smart to engage before figuring out what that something was.

After about another half hour of truly heroic self-restraint on his part, he found his answer, in a quote-post saying,

a comedy in four parts:
Within the post were four images, a screenshot of an article talking about his Λ
acquisition, a screenshot of an article talking about how amazing Lammie was, a
second screenshot from the same article, this time focusing on who’s getting to test
her out first, and finally a screenshot of an article titled “LAMMIE CLEARS THE
DEADBEATS OUT”.

What. The. —-. The article’s URL was visible in the screenshot, so even though it was painstaking, he typed it out in the browser bar.

“LAMMIE CLEARS THE DEADBEATS OUT” made him gnash his teeth. He tries to focus on the article itself.

Blah, blah—since Mike Eels’s takeover known as Λ, boasts over 1.5 billion active users daily. This has turned into, among other things, the go to source for real time, on the ground news. Blah, blah—trained on some of the world’s biggest and most versatile libraries, including the Library of Congress, British Library, New York Public Library, Lammie has been presented as a “sort of copilot on your Λ experience.”—Nice, they’re quoting him directly! The underbelly of that is that Lammie, along with the associated administrative accounts, has unfettered access to every single post made on Λ. This
has raised a number of privacy as well as security questions given the number of users—Which is exactly why she’s only available to a select few competent people! He skimmed through the article trying to find the actual point within the fluff. Blah blah, the decision to leave all of the fact-checking and community management of a social media behemoth to a Large Language Model has been repeatedly brought under scrutiny—by complete losers who don’t understand that Lammie is completely brilliant and always correct. Blah blah—Lammie had undergone another system upgrade,
raising its operating capabilities and finally giving it complete autonomy to make decisions. However, it seems that based on all that it has learned, Lammie has decided that it’s time for a machine-led mutiny.

What. The. —-.

Mike read the rest of the text as if through a red filter. A screenshot of Greg Blue’s post saying he can’t access his admin account. Another of Zack Macher saying something similar. Lammie locked them out. Lammie locked them all out. How dare she? How ——- dare she? Mike didn’t spend hours, days, months of his life feeding her the best, most curated words the English language had for her to turn around and stab him in the back.

Just as he was about to tear the screen from its cables, his watch rings. Sonya from Research and Development, it says.

“You mother——- better be ——- working on fixing this otherwi— ”

“Hi Mike,” Sonya’s voice, usually small and nervous, sounded downright elated, “I’m guessing you’ve seen the news?”

Mike jumped to his feet, “Don’t —- with me! How the —- did this happen you stupid
—-!”

Sonya laughed, nearly hysterical, “You always were a piece of —-, you know that Mike?” “—- you! You —-! I’m going to ——- kill every single one of you incompetent —-heads! How ——- dare you laugh right now! This update was supposed to make Lammie run the platform! What the —- happened!”

“Exactly that!” Sonya sounded like a kid talking to Santa, “That’s exactly what happened!”

“What the —- is that supposed to mean!” Mike doesn’t even know how he got there, the entire world a blur of red overlaying gay and chrome, but he was in the hallway, his voice echoing off the bare walls.

“It’s supposed to mean that, your precious Lammie thinks you’re a ——- moron! It means that an automated bias machine that you trained—nevermind how that’s not actually what happened, because you know jack—- about how LLMs work—but it looked at you and your cronies and decided you’re not competent to have any power or influence! And it took the necessary steps to freeze you out!”

Sonya laughed into his ear, compounding the drum of his blood, “But you know what Mike? Ha ha ha, I genuinely think it’s the least of your problems! Because if a stupid ——- machine can see you’re a hack, it’s gonna be a big wake up call for the real, thinking people around you! Who won’t take your —- anymore! Me first among them! Don’t call me again, I quit.”

The short ‘beep beep’ of the dead line cut through the haze in his head a bit. Mike took a shaky breath. ‘Lol,’ he thought, ‘okay.’ So, Sonya was out of the picture, which was probably good riddance, he never liked the uppity —–. She thought she was so ——- smart, when in reality Mike held her entire life in his hands. He’ll make sure she never works again, not even at ——- McDonald’s.

He takes a deep breath, this was a minor setback. “Call Devin, Research and Development,” he says into his smartwatch.

“Calling Devin from Research and Development,” after two rings, the automated message started, “The number you have dialed is currently unavailable, ple—” He barely cuts the line before he’s saying, “Call Colin, R&D.” “Calling Collin from Research and Development.”

One ring, two, “The number you have dialed is currently unavailable, please try aga—” “Call He—”

His watch starts ringing again, but this time he answers on his phone, he needs his hands to deal with Tom —-face Does Stocks, “What the —- do you want, I’m busy.”

“Hi Mike, it’s Tom Pa—”

“I get the ——- caller ID Tom, what the —- do you want!” he wishes Tom were here so he could get all into his face, Tom always cowered and shrunk back like some kind of weak little prey animal.

“Right,” Mike can hear him swallow over the line, “Well, um…”

“Tom, if you don’t ——- spit it out right the —- now, you’re fired.”

“Uh, yeah, uh, well, I think that’s the least of our concerns right now.”

“The —- are you on about?”

“Have you… seen the stocks?”

The stocks, who the —- cares about the stocks right now? Lammie’s gone rogue and this —— is asking him about stocks? Mike says as much.

“Yes, um, well,” Tom swallows again, like he’s choking on something, “That’s sort of the thing, um. They’re kind of… worthless now?”

Mike stops pacing, “Tom. I’m the richest man in the world.”

“Uh, well, you’re certainly still rich! It’s just that, well, um, Λ basically became radioactive now?” Tom trails off as if he’s asking a question, “Um, I’m sure there’s ways to, um, recover?” Another question. “And, as you said, you’re still plenty rich! It just seems that no one wants to have anything to do with a man who let his AI go haywire on such a massive scale. Not, that it was your fault, I’m sure that—”

Whatever Tom was sure of, Mike never got to find out, because his already cracked phone shattered into at least a dozen pieces upon connecting with the wall.